The following actions will prevent/reduce whistle blowing: 1. Giving direct access to higher levels of management by announcing ‘open door’ policies with guarantee that there won’t be retaliation. Instead such employees should be rewarded for fostering ethical behavior in the company. 2. This gives greater freedom and promotes open communication within the organization. 3. Creation of an Ethics Review Committee with freedom to investigate complaints and make independent recommendations to top management. 4. Top priority should be given to promote ethical conduct in the organization by top management. 5. Engineers should be allowed to discuss in confidence, their moral concerns with the ethics committee of their professional societies. 6. When there are differences on ethical issues between engineers and management, ethics committee members of the professional societies should be allowed to enter into these discussions. 7. Changes and updations in law must be explored by engineers, organizations, professional societies and government organizations on a continuous basis.
External Whistle blowing: The act of passing on information outside the organization. Internal Whistle blowing: The act of passing on information to someone within the organization but outside the approved channels. Either type is likely to be considered as disloyalty, but the second one is often seen as less serious than the latter. From corporations’ point of view both are serious because it leads to distrust, disharmony, and inability of the employees to work together. Open Whistle blowing: Individuals openly revealing their identity as they convey the information. Anonymous Whistle blowing: Individual conveying the information conceals his/her identity.
Whistle blowing is an act of conveying information about a significant moral problem by a present or former employee, outside approved channels (or against strong pressure) to someone, in a position to take action on the problem. The features of Whistle blowing are: • Act of Disclosure: Intentionally conveying information outside approved organizational channels when the person is under pressure not to do so from higher- ups. • Topic: The information is believed to concern a significant moral problem for the organization. • Agent: The person disclosing the information is an employee or former employee. • Recipient: The information is conveyed to a person or organization who can act on it.
1. Rights Ethics: - The most basic human right, which needs no justification, as per A.I.Meldon, is to pursue one’s legitimate (those that do not violate others’ rights) interests. - The right to pursue legitimate interests gives a person right to pursue professional moral obligations. - This may be viewed as a human right of conscience directly derived from the basic human right. 2. Duty Ethics: - I have a right to something only because others have duties or obligations to allow me (And not interfere) to do so. - If we derive the meaning of ‘others’ as employers, then the basic professional right is justified by reference to others’ duties to support or not interfere with the work related exercise of conscience by professionals. 3. Utilitarianism:…
Right to Recognition involves two parts. The right to reasonable remuneration gives the moral right for fighting against corporations making good profits while engineers are being paid poorly. Also is the case where patents are not being rewarded properly by the corporations benefiting from such patents? The other right to recognition is non-monetary part of recognition to the work of engineers. But what is reasonable remuneration or reasonable recognition is a difficult question and should be resolved by discussions between employees and employers only.
The right of Conscientious refusal is the right to refuse to engage in unethical behaviour and to refuse to do so solely because one views it as unethical. Two situations to be considered. 1. Where there is widely shared agreement in profession as to whether an act is unethical Here, professionals have a moral right to refuse to participate in such activities. 2. Where there is room for disagreement among reasonable people over whether an act is unethical. Here, it is possible that there could be different ethical view points from the professional and the employer. In such cases the engineers can have a limited right to turn down assignments that violates their personal conscience only in matters of great importance such as threats to human life. This right also depends on the ability of the employer to reassign the engineer to alternate projects without serious economic hardships to the orgn. The right of professional conscience does not extend to the right to be paid for not working.
- There is one basic and generic professional right of engineers, the moral right to exercise responsible professional judgment in pursuing professional responsibilities. - Pursuing these responsibilities involves exercising both technical judgment and reasoned moral convictions. - This basic right can be referred to as the right of professional conscience.